Tonight at CSUN we saw "Katyn" (2007) by Andrzej Wajda. You may remember the title from a review last year; I watched it at home last November, so this was my second go-round but my first on the big screen. As I probably mentioned in my first review, the title is a place name for the Katyn Forest, which is located in Russia. The Katyn Forest became synonymous with a horrific war crime known as the Katyn Massacre, which took place in 1940, in which 22,000 captured Polish Army officers were systematically taken by train, from their prison camps to an outpost in the forest, and then were rapidly executed in a gruesome assembly line. The bodies were then thrown into mass graves dug out of the ground by a bulldozer, and finally were covered over with the upturned dirt and forgotten about.
Relatives in Poland were told various stories, usually that their officer husband/son/brother died of an illness in his prison camp. But rumors began to surface of a massacre, and the Soviets were quick to claim they had solved the mystery. They said it was the Germans who did it, and it was easy to blame on the Germans, whose SS and Gestapo had already committed war crimes of equal ferocity.
But soon after the war ended, there were some Polish officers who had survived the slaughter. They had been conscripted into the new Soviet-controlled NKVD secret police in Poland, and though they were sworn to lie about the massacre and uphold the official story about the Germans, some of them started to talk about what they had witnessed.
And the truth came out - it was the Soviet Army that had carried out the massacre, on the order of their government's Politburo.
What is depicted in the movie is not just war, or even war crimes. Those terms are too clinical to describe what we see onscreen, which is just plain evil. I have mentioned many times that we need to understand that evil is real, and that it is not to be underestimated. Only humans carry out evil, and when they do, there is often a "long road" or process that leads up to it, when it happens en masse, such as in a war. Yes, there are singular acts of evil, such as those committed by serial killers, but large scale evil requires a like-mindedness among a wide spectrum of the population, or the military and it's leaders who are engaged in a war.
You can't just massacre 22,000 army officers (or 6 million Jews) unless everyone involved is in agreement about the action.
That is Evil writ large. To call these things "war crimes" is to sanitise them.
You have to see what happens to understand what it is, and what the motivating force is.
At any rate, sorry for the grimness, but I wanted to explore the theme a little bit because of where we are as a country, and specifically because on the news today we saw some truly disgusting comments made against John McCain, a man who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and who is now dying of cancer.
Both of the comments came out of the Trump camp. One came from a United States Army General, and the other came from an aide to Donald Trump. If you are not aware of these comments, you can Google them if you wish.
I will give you the gist, however. The General insinuated on television that McCain was a coward who succumbed under torture by the Vietnamese and gave them information that was damaging to the US military strategy. The aide to Trump made a very crude remark that McCain was "dying anyway", and so his vote or opinion on a particular matter was of no consequence.
I don't know how many people read this blog, or if anybody I know besides the SB has ever read it. But if anyone is out there who remembers what America is, and what America is supposed to be, I ask you tonight to consider the history of Europe, and what befell those countries after centuries of unresolved strife.
Having seen "Katyn" for a second time tonight, I also remind you that Mass Evil requires a process, to make sure everyone is going to go along with it.
We are now seeing, on our television screens, United States Army Generals and White House aides who work for the monster Donald Trump (evil personified, for real), mock a dying man who fought in Vietnam and was tortured in a Vietnamese prison camp.
At some point, we had better realise that we are up against a potential mass evil developing here.
We may not be at the breaking point just yet, but we are seeing people in high places drop their guard and state exactly how they feel. And we see them mock a dying man. And we see the sycophantic Mike Pence call for an end to the Mueller investigation.
At some point, someone is going to have to stand up to Donald Trump and shut him down.
Or we could have a real problem on our hands, just as Russia did, just as Germany did, and as is depicted in Andrzej Wajda's "Katyn".
See you in the morning. :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment